


Fear's Agents

by ParadifeLoft



Category: Star Wars Legends: The Old Republic
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Knights of the Fallen Empire, Mind Manipulation
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-04-14
Updated: 2016-10-09
Packaged: 2018-06-02 03:54:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 10,525
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6549505
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ParadifeLoft/pseuds/ParadifeLoft
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Darth Nox, once the most unusual member of the Sith's Dark Council, now the galactic fugitive who murdered Zakuul's Immortal Emperor and left its Spire in flames, is possibly the only individual in the galaxy with the power and single-minded fury to be able to finally destroy the being known alternately as Vitiate and Valkorion.</p>
<p>Only problem is, he knows it.</p>
<p>On the eve of the Alliance's mission to steal control of the Eternal Throne's GEMINI frequency, Nox receives a disturbing vision and embarks in secret on a quest to counter its promises.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is pretty much a love letter to my disappointment with KotFE, but especially the recently-released chapter 12. So see if you can spot the following! - your pre-Outlander class/history actually making a difference in the story; the ability to disagree with everyone and their mother (hah) who thinks you need to become something New and Different instead of staying true to your existing traditions and values; Valkorion actually being a scary and threatening antagonist; Vaylin getting to do things rather than standing in her brother's shadow all the time; and last but not least, absolutely no pseudo-philosophical hermit babble anywhere to be seen! :D Enjoy!

On the day of the planned generator raid, Ahriss Kallig woke with a horrific splitting pain all through her skull, and laughing visions along the edges of her retinas of Princess Vaylin, clawing her planned mission to shredded tatters.

She’d had nightmares and troubled sleep occasionally in her life, most prominently after being sent on the run by Thanaton; again after the destruction of Ziost. But _this_ didn’t feel like a nightmare, and brought none of the usual disorientation to her waking awareness that would leave her edgy and irritable. What it felt like was… _knowledge_. Felt like instinct. Something soon was going to go terribly wrong.

And the last time Ahriss fought Vaylin, she nearly died.

Muzzy from sleep, heavy-limbed, utterly beautiful, Lana stirred beside her. Not the most ideal consequence of a Force bond, though it presumably beat carbonite poisoning by proxy. “Nox?” she murmured, putting a hand to the bare skin of her upper arm. “What’s wrong?”

Ahriss slipped out of the bed, away from that hand and its concern, only to shudder slightly at the sudden engulf of morning’s damp cold.

“It’s nothing,” she replied, her self going blank as if to match the claim. “Just usual nerves. I’m going to go look over the schematics some more. You should go back to sleep.”

The worry she felt from Lana gradually quieted as Ahriss went about slipping on a second layer of underclothes and a casual day robe over it, with no apparent alarm or further consternation. She set her head back down against the pillow, silhouette of her body relaxing - not all the way, never all the way - but enough. “I’ll be here if you need me.”

_I always need you_ , Ahriss’s brain supplied, sultry and enticing as usual, but the thought fell flat before it reached her mouth. She left with simply a murmured noise of acknowledgement.

But not to try and corral more of her flighty attention toward the Spire’s schematics.

The personal vessel of Darth Nox was well-known, even five years after her supposed death, to the forces of the oh-so-irritatingly-named Eternal Empire, both around Zakuulan space proper and among the operating crews of its crude methods of galactic pacification - and so despite Theron’s efforts to recover it ( _disappointingly crewless_ ), the _Insatiate_ had nonetheless spent little time off-planet since it was brought to Odessen a few months back. For a trip that intended no contact with Zakuulan forces, though, traveling in Ahriss’s hollowed-out former home posed little danger.

Starting up the engines, hearing the familiar particular hum of the power generators and warming clicks of the hyperdrive waking (background chatter to a hundred discussions of philosophy, language, religion, politics), finally settling into the pilot’s chair (set for someone bigger and taller than her) rather than the one beside it; a part of her had to admit (and subsequently chastise herself with a snide twinge of disgust) that the disadvantage of being immediately recognised was not the only thing keeping her from taking her ship out more often. But it was being worked on, she knew, was assured almost weekly, with each frustrated unthinking drop of a name of someone whom she knew would be _perfect_ for a given conference’s task at hand. It was being worked on.

And… perhaps, once the immediate threat she foresaw was taken care of… the ability to seek out and touch the minds of individuals on a scale as large as an entire fleet might prove… _useful_ , for applications other than combat.

Ahriss’s mind was always running and half-tripping ten steps ahead of wherever her body was. By this point, she’d simply learned to live with it.

But for now: they aimed to gain control of the Eternal Fleet. Like apparently everything else on Zakuul, the logistics of that were simply so much technology; nothing arcane, but merely a question of military logistics and tactics. For all the people who now liked to call her _Commander_ , preferring it, she assumed, to the more accurate and to-the-point _Dark Lord_ for its inoffensiveness to erstwhile Republic loyalists, Ahriss was no military commander; if she was to provide an advantage on the battlefield herself, it would be as a Lord of the Sith - something the galaxy seemed to have nearly forgotten, in the face of _skytroopers_ and _knights_. (Who to Ahriss’s mind might as well have simply been skytroopers with squishier insides under their golden candy coating, for all the soul they had. Or rather, lacked.) Trifles, really - only a threat due to their sheer numbers, and the unchecked reign of terror they’d instituted like so much propaganda by virtue of their novelty on the galactic stage and what by all accounts had been a few very brutal and very public victories early on. The real threat, as Ahriss’s subconscious dance with the Force had evidenced, was the Emperor’s daughter.

The one who’d seen her in carbonite. The one with the will to destroy her own city to capture her prize. The one who had felt her precious brother weakening (and something else, something at the edge of Ahriss’s mind that she couldn’t quite hold - ) and seized that moment to try and destroy both him and their hated enemy, nearly succeeding but for - _something_ -

Ugh, just trying to think about her made Ahriss feel shaky and vague, like too much tea and too much channeling put together all at once. But that was why she _needed_ to make this trip, needed to recover the devices and complete, finally, the path that had been set out for her by the Force in the wake of her bodily rebirth…

When a person had nothing but raw power and no shackles, physical or mental, against its use - the only solution for dealing with her was to affix some. And what better option, what neater, and cleaner, and more fitting punishment, than to trap her in a nightmare of her own mind’s making?

Outside Ahriss’s thoughts, pale purple-blue gave way to star-studded pitch as the ship cleared Odessen’s atmosphere, and points of colourless light streaked into frozen afterimages as it cleared the realm governed by their movement. With a normal hyperdrive, this trip would take weeks, if she was lucky enough to find her way quickly and easily through the anomalies separating Wild Space from the rest of the Republic-explored galaxy. But with a Force-attuned hyperdrive, tech cannibalised from half a dozen Rakatan remnants and able to sync with its pilot’s intentions to lock onto the signature of a world soaked in power – she’d be able to bypass the usual hyperspace lanes in favour of a direct path, and make it in a fraction of the time. And the Arcanum was, while not a planet, certainly a location awash in the Force.

With the takeoff and atmospheric clearance taken care of, the coordinates for Ahriss’s destination entered into the navicomputer, there was little to do now but sit back and wait.


	2. Chapter 2

This far into the treasure trove of a space station that was the Arcanum facility, it had become clear that the replacement Acina had chosen for herself as master of the Empire’s arcane technology had not implemented many new security measures whatsoever since the first time Ahriss had visited. Almost everything was as she remembered – special locks and containment doors for each subsection, special codes to enter new areas and disable automated targeting systems, sophisticated individual recognition software. This all suited Ahriss just fine, for proximate purposes at least; a bit at the back of her mind couldn’t help but be concerned about the possibility of another breach, if nothing had been improved.

…it took longer than she would have liked for the irony of that concern to trickle up to the topmost layer of her consciousness, but once it did, she chuckled slightly to herself.

Her own flagrant breach of security, however, was probably not any sort of profound statement on the ability of the station to repel or execute more potential invaders, considering that for the vast majority of the defenses, Ahriss still possessed the codes the self-declared Emperor had bequeathed to let her traverse the station unimpeded… seven years ago now, it was. Stars.

Not that she could dwell on that now. Any hint of distress, despair (she was _Sith_ , she had no room for despair), and her intended targets would eat her alive.

Descending into the deeper parts of the facility, Ahriss was beginning to enter the areas that she lacked prior familiarity with. From the station’s organization, this was most likely where the Seeds of Rage had been (and continued to be) housed when they were stolen, but her pursuit of the thieves had taken her on a path away from this area, rather than through it. The lower security areas – for a relative application of the term – that she’d already passed through were dedicated, primarily, to the ‘mere’ destructive weapons; items the Empire held in reserve for projects requiring a more specific or arcane touch than could be provided by conventional military hardware, or else things that while powerful and worth study, were not up to the standards of today’s capabilities and ambitions. Ahriss had recognised a few of those latter herself, from discoveries her subordinates had made and subsequently authorised for storage here rather than in the Sphere’s libraries and collections. Many more were unfamiliar.

Branching off from that in the direction opposite to Ahriss’s current path were the higher-security chambers dedicated to anything with a biological component, up to and including actual sentient beings. She was quite glad to be giving that area a wide berth this time, truth be told – she’d seen and fought more than enough rakghouls of late to want to never see the disgusting creatures again, slander to the Dark Lord Muur be damned; and if there were any more Dashade kept in suspension here… Khem Val might have viewed the killing of others among his people as no more a tragedy than she did the murder of rival Sith Lords, but Ahriss had always hated to see any piece of history needlessly destroyed.

In the recesses of her skull, Horak-mul stirred, sent an irritated tendril of disapproval through her awareness – but this was a conversation they’d had numerous times prior, and he would simply have to deal with her perspective. Such was a small price to pay for continued existence, after all, and as he’d proved on numerous accounts, continued existence was of far greater concern to him than having his way on matters of historical opinion. Perhaps that perspective came from having lived amidst what had been the Sith’s Golden Age, rather than the echo of tragedy, of destruction, of what had been _lost_ , underlying even their empire’s triumphs, that Ahriss had been born into. It didn’t seem terribly polite to ask.

But she had come up on her destination, now, and amidst the silent hum of the station, thousands of heartbeats in a symphony of power echoing through the Force, Ahriss paused before the console granting access to the rooms ahead. While the items in storage here had no capacity to obliterate planets in a single press of a button, render legions of enemy soldiers bereft of souls or bodies, or poison landscapes and leave cities desolated for centuries to come, Ahriss had no doubt that their designation as a greater danger requiring accordingly greater security was well-deserved. The earlier measures she’d encountered had required little to deactivate, for one who had the proper codes, but here (as in the properly-functioning system for the biologicals), the security system could not be deactivated in its entirety, even for a short time, but rather required the addition of specific individuals to a do-not-target list, with varying degrees of longevity.

From what she’d assumed from Acina’s years-ago briefing, no code at all for the system was permanent, though her own had of course been the longest-lasting; the ones Ahriss had, by contrast, were of a short duration, perhaps a day – and more importantly, were not a blanket pass to engage in any sort of action she desired  once inside. Ideally, the items she wanted wouldn’t be classified under ‘do not touch’, but. She couldn’t know or guarantee that.

Because this was the section of the facility dedicated to devices aimed at altering the mind – the users’, or external targets of the users’ choosing. Simple if large-scale destruction of a singular nature was a dangerous tool, certainly, but a tool was all it was, and a wayward visitor could ultimately only do so much with it. Trying to use one of _these_ when not authorised, even with permission to study a different item, on the other hand… That was another thing entirely.

On the security console, Ahriss pulled the screen up, and began entering her codes.

And the difference lay not only in lethality but in a philosophically existential threat. To gain new perspectives, new abilities, new inclinations all guided by an get external object, while in possession of all the creativity and versatility of a _person_ … for a Sith to be enslaved to the will of such a device was a miserable failure for such an individual, a obliteration of all they hoped to achieve in the wake of power they could not handle. For the Empire as a whole… to be ruled by the will of an object or a force that cared for nothing in sith society but the perpetuation of its own nature, at the expense of anything else – was sacrilege. Enslavement to such a force was no better, indeed no different, from the enslavement to the Force that the Jedi so advocated and praised.

As she typed in a few more keystrokes, waiting for the security console to scan her genetic thumbprint and record her in the station subsection’s cache as a permitted individual, not a threat and not a target for elimination, a swollen sensation of dizziness and nausea began to twine up slowly through Ahriss’s core. Several moments passed while she ignored it, dismissing it as just a mundane symptom of the location – before with an alarming speed, she found herself forced her up against the cool metal wall, leaning back and closing her eyes with several murmured curses, unable to keep it on the margins of her head and waiting with an unpleasant desperation for it to pass.

Of all the damned obnoxious things in the galaxy… The notion of the artifacts here sickening her, after all she’d studied and experienced and inoculated herself with, was simply _insulting_.

Gritting her teeth together, a reminder of physical control as well as a deliberate counter to the automatic heavy intake and expulsion of breath that she knew, physiologically, could drag a person closer into fear – Ahriss dipped into the expanse of her power, like a cleansing reservoir of darkness to purge all physical unpleasantness from her body. The anger bubbling up in response to the insult she felt fueled the technique she used to wash the sick feeling away – blast it away, it felt more like in certain places, as the creeping tendrils of foreign malice produced a sensation more like burning than drowning as they left her.

When it was done, she let out a held breath, and returned slowly to standing on her own feet. How absolutely… delightful.

Well, at least by the time her sickness had passed, the security station had finished its project of scanning and entering her biomarkers into its list of friendlies. The doors slid open. With only a brief hesitation, a sudden tinge of foreboding that she brushed away as irrational, lingering twitchiness from the attack of nausea, Ahriss slipped inside.

In all honesty, in better times, Ahriss would have loved to spend a month or two going through all these devices and looking for their historical lineages, the political circumstances, personal ambitions, and conceptions of the Force that had led to their creation. She didn’t have any strong impulse to actually _use_ most of them; her desires for empire were cultural, political, _insular_ – not oriented toward conquest and personal glory. Well, okay, a small amount of personal glory. Not like what she would guess for the makers of these items, though.

And even beyond that, she was the Councilor of Ancient Knowledge. Even with the Empire splintered into fragments, the Council she sat on in ruins, her own life barely any better… she had a responsibility to the Sith. An _ambition_ for the Sith. One she wished didn’t have to be eclipsed, for the time being, by this tedious alliance-building to destroy her own society’s pale, posturing, unworthy, unwanted step-sibling.

A shudder of visceral disgust and fury clenched Ahriss’s body from the inside, almost as soon as the thought had manifested. _“Your ambitions are a blight on this galaxy!_ ” a woman’s voice echoed with a growl, the verbal expression of bared teeth. _“It is to my eternal misery that our Covenant never found your exiles’ refuge and wiped you from existence!”_

With the words’ aftershocks ringing in her head, mounting a sort of pressure against her skull, Ahriss’s vision slipped into dancing white and black light for a handful of moments – the sensation reminiscent of standing too quickly when she’d forgotten to eat, or when, a longer time ago, one or more of the ghosts she’d bound tried to assert control over her body. She staggered back, putting her hands out to catch herself against a storage case as the dizzy spell drained off and her sight returned to normal. Raana Tey. Now there was a spirit she hadn’t heard from in a while – Ahriss assumed that, having stabilised her condition all those years ago and ruined the raging Jedi’s chances for escape and revenge, she’d just settled into whatever blank state a ghost existed in when not actively haunting anything. Tried to put the thought of existing as fuel for the power of her mortal enemy out of mind.

At least this once, though, exterminatory threats against the Sith made no impression on Ahriss, rolling off her metaphorical back like a mere smattering of rain droplets than the usual deluge knocking her back into a rushing pool of fury. Being alive instead of a few centuries dead, and free instead of bound in another person’s head, not to mention having stolen your opponent’s descendent away as your apprentice, all had a way of making that more manageable.

The physical sensations that came along with ghostly intrusions were a bit harder to get rid of, though as with the earlier attack of nausea – was she getting _sick_? because this was ridiculous – and she couldn’t afford to deal with something so mundane as illness _now_ of all times –  but slipping into the shallows of the wellspring of power she could feel permeating herself and her surroundings was helpful in drawing it out. She took slow, measured breaths, guiding the Force to snuff out her physical weaknesses, flatten the recalcitrant ghost against a corner into nothing. And…

When Ahriss refocused herself on her surroundings, she could see straight in front of her the prize that she had come here to claim. The Phobis devices.

With a sinister glee of triumph rising inside her, Ahriss crossed the space to where the three talismans waited, issuing a silent challenge, in their storage casing. She’d be warring with a sense of dread even now, before she’d held them, looked into their centers, were it not for the materials used to house the Arcanum’s treasures, uniquely ensorcelled to dampen and contain malignant Force presences.

Almost every mind who’d held these objects had gone mad from the trade of power, intimate knowledge and residence in one’s deepest psyche. Those who had not, had only lasted so long as the stabilising structure of the bond they shared remained intact; and with the removal of one vertex of that pyramid, the rest had all deteriorated, so quickly, so viscerally. But Ahriss… she was perhaps the one person in the galaxy who could circumvent such hazards. Because she _had_ six minds, six essences in the Force just as they had, to create a web of mutual feedback among which to spread the experience of the devices’ power. And yet – the unique point of victory - they were all contained in a single person! She could not be separated from her fellows by their deaths, because the spirits who would form the network supporting her knowledge were a _part_ of her, bound until she chose to release them. _She_ would not be vulnerable the madness that befell the Dread Masters upon Lord Styrak’s destruction.

But as her hand reached the outer casing of the Phobis devices’ containment – she paused. Six? An instinct in her hissed angrily, felt like some animal slamming itself against cage walls in a rage to get out. _Six_ minds, no, there were – there were _seven_ , total; she began to count, suddenly seized by the importance of this fact – herself, Ergast, Andru, Tey, Horak-mul, the false Revan –

The entire atmosphere inside the space station went cold. A blanket of ice seemed to crash down over Ahriss, all the warmth of her body fleeing outward along with another _essence_ – she doubled over coughing, so violent her eyes teared up, she could hardly breathe –

And as she fought to push herself to standing, the presence of another individual slithered in through the side of her awareness, slippery and well-versed in staying out of sight and yet simultaneously _blinding_ , jagged expulsions of excess power like solar flares all around a tightly-wound core, threatening to spill out into the rest of the world. Ahriss sucked in air in a painful wheeze, turning around to see _what_ , in all the _stars_ , had happened –

The source of the presence spoke. “So it is you, Father. I _thought_ there was more to what I saw than just a weapons heist.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, _that_ was an adventure trying to get this plotted/written/despaired of/edited and rewritten... How did I even manage to get this nearly to 4,000 words?? We just don't know. Having lots of shenanigans happening in the Force that needed to be described, probably. That shit takes more words than you'd assume o.O Well, that and three very noisy characters who all want lots of air time. Damn megalomaniacs...
> 
> But hey, point is, new chapter! Thank you all for your patience here! :D

Vaylin. Vaylin, somehow, was here, in the Empire’s most secret technological treasury. Half the purpose of Ahriss’s mission to the Arcanum was to take possession of one sure way to beat her, to avert the vision she’d seen in her dream of Vaylin utterly destroying Kaliyo’s strike team on Zakuul – 

And now she was here instead.

She felt like her head was spinning, trying to follow and yank apart too many threads suddenly twisting in on her and trying to trap her in a web like prey.

Take one thread. Just one... Ahriss took a breath, held it still, calm.

…Coming here to destroy Vaylin at the Spire during the generator raid made no sense.

She took another breath, though the calm was fraying. This plan made no sense. The travel time alone would have made her intended sequence of events impossible to carry out; if Vaylin was going to be a threat on Zakuul, Ahriss should have stayed on Odessen, then made the jump to the Eternal Empire’s capital once she determined more about the nature of such a threat –

No. As she pulled that thread free, the memory rushed back to her, clear this time – she doubled over in another coughing fit again, something feeling like it was trying to shove itself back into her through her nose and throat. She hadn’t seen Vaylin on Zakuul, that wasn't the dream she had. She’d seen Vaylin here. Exactly as she was now. This wasn’t –

“This is all you’re capable of?" 

Amidst the whirl of thoughts, Ahriss trying to separate false impressions from truth, create some semblance of reality, Vaylin’s voice sliced through, disdain edged with fury.

“You’re really the one Arcann’s got everyone in a frenzy murdering each other for?” Lana's assessment was that the Force-wielders among Zakuul had pitiful training channeling their fury into power - but it was clear from even this portion of an outburst that Vaylin, if she were given a proper teacher, had fury aplenty to make a formidable Sith.

But not a few moments later, and something else, even more loathsome than Ahriss from the spike in her Force aura, caught her attention. The object of her focus shifted – “This is who you reserve all your esteem for, Father?"

Ahriss's breath caught.

Vaylin continued to speak, unaware or uninterested in the understanding dawning, and spreading like mushrooms' tendrils through Ahriss's awareness of herself, her place here. "You lock all my power away, when you could have taught me, and then decide she’s who you want to pin all your hopes on?” she shouted. Vaylin's presence in the Force had begun to crackle like clouds too full of static, ready to let lightning strike the first target to present itself with no regard for consequences, simply to gain some relief from the pressure. And standing between the both of them, a well of power more stable than Vaylin’s but more unnatural, more sickening like the scent of molten metal and rot –

Valkorion had emerged.

His apparition bore the same robes he’d worn when Ahriss had struck his physical form down, that body’s same face, and a naked disgust for the being before him who was his daughter. Valkorion, yes, though to Ahriss there would never be any mistaking his signature in the Force for anything but Vitiate.

And amidst the slow revelation of knowledge she'd almost prefer to not bear, it was as though a smothering weight had been lifted from Ahriss's mind.

As he looked at Vaylin, head shifting minutely from the rest of his posture, the disgust on his face began to merge with a dismissive sneer. One that took over even as an angry current built around his ghostly form, a warping of the physical world's relationship to the Force.

With a crackling flash of light, Vaylin was thrown back, feet leaving the floor and a startled cry leaving her throat before she crashed back against a section wall. Vallkorion's voice emitted a deep vibrating force through Ahriss's head, possibly audibly as well, when he spoke - shouted - to match that show of power.

"The fact that you follow me here only to whine like a child displays exactly why you are unworthy of my attentions, girl," he scolded, presence layered in disgust once more. Vaylin had already begun to clamor to her feet, hands clenched as fists and all her muscles bowstring-tight.

But Valkorion had already lost interest in her. In barely a second, all the intensity of his focus had shifted back to Ahriss.

“ _You_ are hardly less a disappointment.”

Less power behind this statement, though still plenty lurking in the ambient air. Ahriss scowled, clenching her teeth and resting tight knuckles against the metal of her lightsaber hilt. She took a step, rocking back and forth between her feet in a small confined pacing arc, her guard raising like hairs under her hood on the back of her neck.

"What must it take for you to grasp your path, the power it requires?” Valkorion chided her. Not rising to the bait – or not visibly – not moving at all as far as her hypervigilance could tell, simply standing and waiting like an orator. “Even when I see your destiny laid out, tell you how you must achieve it, you persist in shrinking from power,” he said. “You persist in refusing to become what has been your birthright!"

If it was supposed to be some stinging criticism, the effect was entirely lost – Ahriss was not one of Valkorion’s children, begging and murdering for a scrap of his approval. Once, she might have had a crisis hearing the Emperor of the Sith say so much to her – but _this_ being was no Sith. He had told her as much numerous times, until she was full to the brim with rage from irritation at his droning alone… and on top of that, he still stank of all the populace of Ziost. Ahriss wanted no destiny perceived by such a foul being as that.

And he didn’t deserve to feel the full strength of her rage, either. “Shrink from power?” she threw back with the performance of a short, laughing sneer. “I  _bound_  you. All your power is mine to do with as I please, but you think I don’t want power because I don’t want your pathetic excuse for ‘truth’?” Deluded. He was just as deluded as he’d been when he spoke to her in that neverending carbonite dream, and even though she’d promised herself not to allot him any real anger any more, it was hard to keep it from simmering once again the longer she spoke.

“You’ve been playing the detached, superior being for too long,” she finished. “You forget what a _Sith_ is.”

And he forgot who she was. Valkorion could try and manipulate her as much as he liked - grandiose pronouncements or no, Ahriss was familiar with ghosts' tricks. The only place they had power was when you got too lost in their lies to break their hold on you. And now she knew he was going to play this game... oh, she would draw such strength from remembering every way he'd ever gave her insult.

And then not a few brief moments past that thought, she felt a jolt of warning in the Force. Instinctively, she turned to look behind her –  

A wave of kinetic power, shadow massing like stone and larger than her entire stature, caught Ahriss hard in the chest.

She buckled, lungs seizing and leaving her unable to breathe, losing all her balance to fall curled on her side. Frantic adrenaline pumping through her mind and limbs screamed to assess the situation.

It was Valkorion coming toward her, looming over her like some spawnbeast full of teeth and venom.

"You have grown complacent," he hissed. "If you continue like this, my children will destroy you."

Fury ignited like a spark in the low-simmering rage in her. Ahriss breathed in static from the air as she pushed herself back to her feet, aches in her body melting away from her awareness with her power. The static traveled through boiling blood, collecting prickles in her fingertips... and she let the web of electric power arc into the air. A bursting ball of light split into tiny crackling lines, covering the whole of the space Valkorion's shade had occupied and wreathing him in a flash as white as bones.

Direct attacks instead of psychic ones? She could play that game too.

With a burst of rage in the Force, the ghost winked away – a shade’s apparition in a specific form and location could be dissipated with the direction of enough power toward the ties between the Force and the physical material composing that space. It was a much more specific technique than the fumbling attempts to physically destroy a ghost used in most first-time encounters... but by now, this was practically a specialty.

In a few long moments more, Valkorion's image began to manifest again – farther away this time. Ahriss faced him with the wild, bared-teeth smile of an animal presenting a threat, expecting as much to happen, even slightly amused by the distance he thought to put between them. Oh yes, you could remove a ghost's _ties_ to one location - but if you knew how to do that, you should also know that it was much harder to destroy the ghost itself.

"Better," the shade pronounced, still a sneering face of haughty disdain, as if he had suffered nothing from her attack. "Now stop holding yourself back."

Ahriss’s vision rippled in a hazy disturbance, and the room seemed to shift. Valkorion became half-formed, still solid but hard to pin down – with a noise of anger, irritation, Ahriss tried to clear the distortion in her senses away, but it didn’t accomplish much more than a jolt of dizziness. – And then, coming _through_ Valkorion’s form, apparently no worse now for how she’d been tossed aside like a doll, Vaylin stalked into view. The rage on her face matched the one Ahriss felt. But she hadn’t…

Blinking, disoriented, Ahriss searched for where she'd _seen_ Vaylin go down, where as far as she knew she hadn’t moved – Nothing there; and it was a different part of the room from what she remembered.

An amused hum traveled down her spine. Ahriss clenched her teeth. Oh, she knew what he was doing, and he would _not_ confuse her like this, he would _not_ -

A moment later, the Force screeched another warning barely a second before a spike of pain and fury cracked through the air, bisecting the space between Ahriss and Valkorion’s shade with a physical shockwave that made Ahriss stumble. “Why does everybody talk so much!” Vaylin snapped. One arm remained outstretched before her from the blast – but with the other, she held aloft her lightsaber, whose blade hissed to life in a ray of golden light.

And in Ahriss's mind - in both her mind and Vaylin's, she suddenly sensed with clarity - Valkorion's voice pointed out his daughter, as she issued her challenge.

"This one is no longer useful to me. Dispose of her."

Vaylin struck first, furious, a torrent of uncontrolled power in her speed and strength. It roiled from her like an unshielded reactor, catching on the blade of Ahriss's lightsaber as her red swept up to twist away the opening overhand strike of Vaylin's gold. Raw energy of the Force burst around the sabers like a violent oceanspray, twisting about Ahriss and her own power as she inhaled, any other time a pleasurably intoxicating awareness. Now it just threatened to overwhelm her.

Ahriss had challenged, fought, beaten others with a prodigious depth of strength in the Force before, a greater sum of experience immersed in the paths of power and facility with translating each moment of connection into physical effect. That was not the problem here. It was simply - Vaylin had almost no training. She'd been taught to fight, yes, but not to use the Force. That was pure instinct, natural to her like breathing or the feeling of nourishment in her body - and she had no _control_. Each movement was a torrent of power, shoved in the direction of the object she chose, crashing into it and its excesses overflowing to rend apart anything caught in the vicinity. And she didn't _stop_ , or _tire_ , or broadcast intention –

Pivoting a tight defense of the saberstaff about her body, Ahriss pulled herself inward, wrapping her core in layers of mental shields, shrinking from a sprawl of awareness, connection, instantaneous use of each thread in the Force and each prickle of static, down to the packed, bursting density of a neutron star. And as they moved, small circles of footwork engulfed by a wild torrent, Vaylin rained blow after blow down on her, determining to tire her arms pushing upward first, making use of her greater height.

Taking down larger enemies was hardly a _difficult_ thing; they were essentially the _only_ enemy it was inherently possible for her to fight given her stature. But normally Ahriss could make greater use of the Force and her surroundings, and living instead fully in her body and swordplay rather than partially in the energy of the Force, she was getting _tired_ –

“Even before my brother told me what you’d done, I could _feel_ it, you know!” Vaylin said, on the crest of a downswing, all chained exasperation and frustrated ambitions. “I felt Father in you in the carbonite, before you even woke up! Do you _know_ what he does to you, when he gets in your head?!”

Ahriss ignored her. The whining rants these Zakuulans were so fond of were utterly irrelevant, boring, distracting _despite_ their boredom and irritated her all the more for it. And all her focus was consumed by keeping Vaylin from ripping her apart –

A fractional second’s flash-forward knowledge, and Ahriss saw an opening – fierce will and desire sparked in her – and she feinted to the side, batted Vaylin’s saber away with a small low parry – and thrust the tip of her opposite blade toward Vaylin’s chest.

Vaylin made a noise of pained surprise, and though she jumped back, hitting Ahriss’s blade back toward herself, it was not before a scorch-mark spread from the point of contact on her armor, a blast-cannon’s crater in her pristine surface. Ahriss might have grinned if her focus hadn’t been so singular; either way, with the chance presenting itself, a small opportune window of less danger, she uncurled a few threads of her defenses, reached out in the Force to the immense ocean of dark power that had swelled in this place. Lightning jumped about her fingertips and lightsaber.

And with a scream of rage from her opponent, a display cabinet near the chamber’s door ripped away from the wall, hurtling toward her artifacts and all – one talisman let out a startled screech of alarm in the Force that jabbed like ice into Ahriss’s ribs – two sides of the structure crunching in upon themselves, horribly distorted as they flew. Glass shattered, spraying outward in all directions. Ahriss tossed herself into a crouch shielding her face with gloved hands, and crying out as shards sliced through her arms and hood nonetheless. In the dim corners of her awareness, she saw the same thing happen again to several other structures, as cabinets, crates, even a monitoring console, buckled and jerked about uncontrolled in space.

Glass aside, through her own shielding and Vaylin’s concern with destruction over aim, none of the furniture hit her, crashing instead into the far walls, the floor, yet more artifacts _that should not be treated so roughly_ –

But in the Force, there might well have been nothing _but_ glass shards, the whirl of a hundred sources of energy snatched and twisted and slipping through fingers released like shredding claws into the layers of her awareness that Ahriss had stretched out into the broader space of the chamber.

She couldn’t tell if she screamed, or cried out at all. All it was, was pain, not in the surface of her body but in whatever threads kept the pieces of her composite soul tied together, herself and her connection to the rest of the universe. Her heart, her head, her limbs, were all vibrating so hard they might burst.

_You did not come here to be helpless!_

A sharp crack of a voice, a sentiment, snapped through her, and she gasped like a drowning woman. The sudden intake of oxygen twisted her vision around, dizzy – she rolled onto her back, uncurled her legs tangled in her skirt, her hands –

Ahriss pulled the tattered edges of her senses in toward her center, leaving only a single knot of intention outside her shields. All her focus, she poured into that notion – reached out toward one of the few cases that hadn’t collapsed –

An inscribed pyramid of obsidian and onyx, scarcely larger than a standard holocron, met her outstretched hand.

For an instant, the galaxy was laid bare before grasp.

Through the inscriptions on the device, moving across its surface like shining star-glimmers, curious and sharp-edged and _hungry_ – Ahriss could see a glimpse into all the connections between the people, the past, the future, each heartbeat of a moment that was _now_ – all strung into chains upon webs upon multilayered knots – that made up but a portion of the Force. Each node, each line, a temptation to take hold, pull and follow until it all unraveled in her hands, those people and events hers to command.

The device spoke to her.

_Give me your fears_.

The inscriptions on the surface, and on each layer beneath she could sense, pulled, compelled, sought to draw the answer and assent from her, as the device bled a taste of its promised power into her mind. Even here, she was still observing, cataloguing – old Sith script, letters combined to sentences even she could barely read like this. A masterpiece; scarce a wonder its study could absorb so many brilliant powers…

_Provide me blood for blood, and you shall have the empire you so desire to shape in your own perfected image_.

A true Sith empire, reborn, renewed, each subject a piece of the glory of freedom, understanding all that went into the forms their culture took…

Ahriss frowned, as a fuzziness stretched through her thoughts. She could not accomplish that through fear, not directly – she needed terror as a _tool_ , a method to vanquish her enemies so she might _build_ her desires without the distraction of constant external threat –

Ah, yes. There was just such a threat here.

Wordlessly, Ahriss opened herself to the consuming grasp of the device, let it witness and drink in the nearest record of her thoughts and being. The screaming adrenaline coursing through her body even now, and the fear it took in its bloody hands, that would shove itself forward in her mind the moment she let the device and its visions go.

In one stretched, eternal moment it held her, made her an extension of its will. Its bliss in the terror and agony of others, inseparable halves of the purity of the universe...

_You have a job to do!_

With a wrenching sensation, she stumbled back onto her own feet, head ablaze with knowledge. And she took that knowledge; rifled through it with a clarity of presence she'd only known before in obsession - she lifted a hand out toward Vaylin.

Amidst the sudden crashing cease of the whirlwind in the Force, Ahriss could hear the slightest intake of breath; a sputter of footsteps -

_"No - no! Not again! Get out of my_ head _!"_

Satisfaction and an intoxicated giddiness flooded her for a moment, as the scent of burning, bloodied flesh in the Force was joined and washed through by fear, hitting hard enough to make a lesser person double over and gag. But it didn't _stop_ in the air around her, as she was used to - through the conduit of the inscriptions on the device, the connection it maintained between her mind and the Force - with a greedy, devouring smile, it seized Ahriss's insides as well.

She’d experienced terror before. But this was – it wasn’t _hers_ , it was different and came from somewhere outside and she had no reference point to _parse_ what she saw, what she _knew_ –

 

She was alone. Utterly. Cut off, forsaken – not even the threat of power to crush anybody who would dare get in her way; nobody _cared_ , not even to fear her. And under her skin, a ticking bomb sat pressed against her mind, one she could dimly remember being _free_ of, once, for a brief period of time that almost drove her to sob with the pain of having it _back_ again, eating up everything she wanted to be, turning her memories into a long stretch of haze.

_I could be better than all of them!_ , she heard herself cry, choked in a desperate plea, her voice foreign to her own ears. _Why won’t you let me show you!_

The world, the galaxy, looked back at her, her outburst. It wasn’t _for_ them! How _dare_ they, how dare they - ! Things she couldn’t keep bottled up inside, because where would she have room?! No room, no room for anything at all inside her, just stifled tension like a headache she could never be rid of, and the pain of a hundred thousand souls boiling under her skin that she couldn’t let _out_ –

_Because our people would hate you even more than_ I _do_.

The answer to her question was spoken with such a sound of deep regret. As though it were a burden. As though everything he had _drove_ her to was a _burden_ , and – they all agreed. They all agreed with him. _We are the galaxy’s chosen, and you have no place in our world_ , the chorus spoke. Condemned.

_You will never have_ anything _._

\----

If the stress of the Force flowing and bursting inside her like uncontrolled lightning wasn’t enough to make her body twitch and rebel – Rakatan-enhanced cellular capacity notwithstanding – then so intense and sustained a _chemical_ fear response, even as just a backlash, only made it worse. Ahriss trembled, shaking as she stood, breath coming in occasional gasps as though amidst everything else, her brain had forgotten to keep the process automated.

And then, as she tried to inhale – she couldn't breathe at all.

Her mind, or whatever was left of it, wailed to continue the physiological symptoms of alarm. But other than that… despite that… her body, slowly, began to slacken. Let go its grip on fear, the tension drawing her rigid and ready to fight if only the rest of her brain circuitry hadn’t left her paralysed.

She knew she should be more concerned with the pressure stopping up her throat. But her head felt hot and fuzzy, and _tired_ , too tired to expend yet more energy on a new problem.

In a few moments, her knees hit the floor. Discarded to one side, the pyramid in black lay out of her grasp. And... further out, something else too, difficult to discern... she blinked, and the image resolved into a pair of unfamiliar boots. Someone else had found them…? Shouldn’t be possible, not here…

She tried to follow the boots up to legs, up to a body, a face… grey spots dancing before her eyes stymied her. And then, vision fading out almost completely – her last few thoughts drifted out into nothingness.


	4. Chapter 4

_A tall, armored figure in an eye mask steps into view. A second figure, hands bound, leans forward on a low bunk mattress._

_“What is this? Where am I?”_

_“You are in the crew bunkroom of an Imperial_ Fury _-class Interceptor. You are quite safe for the time being, provided you make no ill-conceived escape attempts. Once my current business is concluded, your choices will determine whether you accompany me further of your own will, or whether you become a prisoner of the Sith Empire and accompany me further under_ my _will.”_

_“A prisoner of – wait. I know you. You’re Acina’s little trained akk dog. And you expect me to_ believe _any of your threats? My brother will_ crush _you when he learns what you’ve done!”_

_“The title is_ Emperor’s Wrath _. Before you mock it, you may wish to be reminded it has a bit more history than yours –_ High Justice _. And your brother will not be learning what has transpired here. You have neither the bond nor the control necessary to contact him – try if you like; it will only prove my assessment correct.”_

_“You don’t know anything about us! We’re the children of the immortal god-killer, conquerors of the galaxy. We know_ everything _about your wreck of an empire, because it_ belongs _to us! Meanwhile_ you’re _no more than a slave. Master’s pet, who barks and bites on command. It’s cute you think you have a chance.”_

_“Hmm. I have a small correction to that. Your_ brother _is the one who knows all the intimate details of our Empire. You do not.”_

_“We are equals! He doesn’t hold me back the way the rest of you wanted!”_

_“An emperor has no equals. It is an unalterable fact of the universe. Tell me – which systems in the Imperial Core did you invade first, and why were those chosen?”_

_Silence._

_“I refuse to play your little interrogation games. They’re_ beneath _me.”_

_“Don’t worry, you don’t have to respond. Especially since you can’t. The answer, if you’re curious, is Korriban, Dromund Kaas, Khar Delba, Rhelg, and Krayiss, because they are worlds of historical and religious significance in Sith culture, and your war planners wished to destroy us psychologically before they did so militarily. No doubt Ziost would also have been on that list if your father had not accomplished as much on his own first.”_

_“I didn’t ask for a history lesson!”_

_“Of course you didn’t.”_

_Neither person speaks. They each watch each other, as if waiting for something._

_“I shall leave you to your privacy for now. Think on this.”_

_The armored figure leaves. The door slides shut._

\----

_“Good morning, Princess Vaylin. I presume your dietary and somnolent requirements have been adequately addressed? Have you contemplated our last conversation?”_

_“Where are you taking me?”_

_“I have a package I need to drop off. After that, as I said, it’s up to you.”_

_“Then you have a faulty definition of what_ prisoner _means.”_

_“_ Prisoner _is a structural label. It does not describe the internal reality of one’s power. But your misunderstanding this is hardly your own fault. It is the hallmark of one lacking a proper Sith education.”_

_A sneer._

_“What package are you delivering, and under whose orders?”_

_“Why do you assume I am under orders?”_

_“Shut up! I don’t have to speak with you. Leave me.”_

_“Very well.”_

_\----_

_“Your ‘Sith education’ sounds like a contradictory mess,_ Emperor’s Wrath _. How is someone supposed to ‘free herself’ if she was never imprisoned to begin with?”_

_The masked figure turns, and smiles._

_“To be free is to possess three things: a desire; knowledge of that desire; and the ability to create it as reality. There are prisoners who possess all of these, and kings who have none. Freedom will often_ overturn _such structures… but it is not dependent on their existence.”_

_“If you Sith are all so free, I’d expect you to have thrown off my brother by now, wouldn’t you? Unless Father was right to_ dump _you.”_

_“Well, we can’t all achieve what we aspire to, can we?”_

_“Maybe_ you _can’t. I can. And I will.”_

_“From inside this bunkroom?”_

_“Be silent! You have no right to address me in such terms!”_

_The masked figure takes several slow steps toward the woman on the bunk, until vhe stands close enough to tower over her. The young woman stares up, furious and defiant._

_“_ Rights _are granted by_ power _, Princess. Here, you have none – except the power to make a choice.”_

_They are both silent for several moments, a contest of wills._

_“You will_ never _keep me prisoner here. Just you wait, I will escape and when I do, you will know more agony than you have ever imagined before in your life.”_

_“You’ll excuse me if I can imagine quite a bit.”_

_\----_

_“Good morning, Princess. You are doing well? Is there anything you’d like me to procure for you?”_

_The woman doesn’t stir from the bunk._

_“Does it_ look _like I’m_ doing well _?”_

_“I make no claims of knowledge as to your emotional state, Princess. You are, however, welcome to elaborate if you so desire.”_

_In a sudden, violent motion, she pushes herself up, swinging out from the bed to stand, in a stance reminiscent of lightsaber combat. She has no weapon._

_“Don’t give me that! I can_ see _you, I can feel you, every time you’re here! Watching me,_ mocking _me, thinking of how pathetic and weak I am, immature and uncontrolled and posturing and_ laughable –”

_The masked figure folds zer arms, and stands still._

_“What I am thinking, is that you are not the first young woman I have encountered who has had her life and talents stolen to be used as a tool by others.”_

_“See! I_ knew _that was a lie, and you’re just as deluded as the rest of them, you don’t know a_ thing _about me, I’m not some_ other _girl you know –”_

_“Certainly not. She is currently a well-respected Lord of the Sith who has recently taken her first apprentice. You are a prisoner whose whereabouts are unknown to anyone who would take an interest, and who has been lying unmoving on a bunk mattress for the past several hours. Yes, I do have security cameras installed in each room of the ship – not my idea, but it’s proven useful a few times.”_

_For a stretch of time, the only movement in the room is the rise and fall of the young woman’s breathing, and a slight trembling in her hands. Finally, she turns away from the masked figure toward the wall, hands clenching into fists._

_“Then get me something to entertain myself. I want to watch a holodrama.”_

_“Indeed. As you say, Highness.”_

 

\----

 

Ahriss wakes, in a comfortable bed, in a room with an intimately familiar architecture but equally unfamiliar interior decoration, with a thoroughly unpleasant throbbing ache all throughout her skull.

She’s hardly a ship enthusiast of any sort, but she knows the ranking officer’s quarters of a _Fury_ -class Interceptor when she sees it.

Rubbing small circles into her temples and groaning at the stiffness throughout her body – the bed might be comfortable but she’s never done well being deposited in one while unconscious and left to the devices of her own contorted posture – she sits up, reaching instinctively to the Force to draw off a small tendril of energy, to circulate through her and realign all the tissues, make her stop… _hurting_ so damned much.

The last thing she remembers is subduing Vaylin with the power of the Phobis Core, but neither is now anywhere to be seen, and unless somebody thought it would be an amusing prank to redecorate the _Insatiate_ ’s personal quarters – an extremely _bad_ if not lethally mistaken assumption on their part…

She swings her legs over the side of the bed and stands carefully, glancing down at the small bedside table as she steadies herself against it. Spotless, with a portable audio earset atop it but nothing else – the rest of the room the same, almost entirely absent of personal effects, datapads, even artwork. The faint, lingering hum of the Force hovers in the air, but it’s uncomplicated, the echo of a single person rather than the multilayered mingling of artifacts and old texts and icons and rituals that envelops her like home in her own ship’s quarters. The shade of power and _will_ in the raw, molten metal impression marks the room’s owner as Sith well enough, if the ship itself hadn’t already suggested as much, so presuming this is somebody associated with the Empire – a pang twitches in Ahriss’s chest at the thought, and she bites her tongue but doesn’t try to push it away –

If this is somebody from the Empire, the most logical assumption is that they wish to question her for breaking, entering, and additional breaking in the Arcanum; but on the other hand, presumed criminals and prisoners tend not to be left unchained and unattended in their captor’s personal quarters.

She’s never been much a fan of being left in the dark as to the reasons behind her situation. Time to find the ship’s owner.

Ultimately, all it takes is walking through the door. The years have added a few pounds, a few lines to what’s visible of zer face, but the figure sitting cross-legged in the central chamber’s curved booth with half a lightsaber’s worth of stray components scattered across zer surroundings is unmistakably Meshurat Vestiin, the Emperor’s Wrath. And that certainly suggests enough on its own.

Ahriss spreads her stance, crosses her arms over her chest waiting for Vestiin to acknowledge her presence; if she’s not a prisoner – even if she _was_ a prisoner, for that matter – then that makes this a conversation between equals, at the very least.

“Long time no see, Lord Wrath,” she says after another moment of no response. “Shall I take it that Acina was unhappy to hear of her stronghold being broken into?”

Vestiin finally looks – looks? – away from the lightsaber components and stands, lanky and towering in what Ahriss can only assume are zer approximation of ‘casual clothes’, which still manage to include armored boots for some reason she can only guess. Vhe cracks a sardonic fraction of a smile, one Ahriss is sure wouldn’t reach zer eyes if vhe had any. “Indeed. I believe her display was the sort of thing the phrase ‘towering rage’ was created for. Naturally, she tasked me with hunting down the intruders.”

Ahriss smirks. “And so you figured the ideal solution was to bring me back to your bed? I’m flattered, Wrath, but you’re not quite the right sort for that. No hard feelings.”

Her witticism earns only the hint of a scowl. “The couches were occupied, and I prefer to keep the medbay cleared for actual _injuries_. Not Sith who’ve blown their brains out playing with toys.”

Of course she’s well aware of the prevailing opinion on mystical artifacts among those Sith brought up in the more militaristic Spheres. It doesn’t surprise her. But it does fray a bit off her patience. “And you wouldn’t by chance have brought my _toys_ along with me, would you?”

“Being old doesn’t make them ‘yours’, Nox.”  Vhe’s got zer own arms crossed over zer chest now too – growing quickly tired, if Ahriss isn’t mistaken, of Ahriss’s preference for semi-veiled banter in such instances. Fitting, how well vhe’d gotten on with Xalek when they’d all worked together as a strike team… had they ever met up again after that, she wonders. Wanders. It was time to get to business, now.

“We are Sith,” Ahriss replies. “The wealth of the Empire belongs to us all.” Her eyes narrow. “And right now, I need the Phobis Devices. Seeing as I can’t just submit the necessary _paperwork_ … well.  You saw the stakes for yourself, after all.”

“Your stakes are currently locked up in my cargo hold.”

Surprise blooms in her before she can control it, and spreads to her face even as it escapes into the Force as well. Did Vestiin truly imply…? And _how_ , if so – ? Ahriss draws herself up, pulling her composure together once more. “You have Vaylin, here? On your ship. For what purpose?”

“I wasn’t about to leave her alone in the Arcanum,” Vestiin replies, revealing nothing. As if it hadn’t occurred to zer that vhe could simply order backup to take the woman into Imperial custody, if vhe had somewhere so urgent to be afterwards… And that only reminded her of the original question, namely where was the Wrath going and why had vhe brought Ahriss with zer.

Before she asks the question though, Ahriss takes a casual few steps further into the room, turning and settling herself down on the couch across from Vestiin, crossing one leg over the other beneath her skirt. It only makes their height difference more pronounced, and in most cases Ahriss had perfected the art of looking directly in the eyes of those taller than her without actually looking up due to the subconscious weakness implied – but here, that’s rather the point. Mutually standing amongst Sith is for confrontation.

“So. Where are we all going?”

A black eyebrow peeks above the top of Vestiin’s mask; vhe uncrosses zer arms and mirror’s Ahriss’s movement with an appraising look to counterbalance the relaxed sprawl of zer limbs. “Your Alliance’s little hideout on Odessen, of course. I would like to speak with its commanding staff.”

Whatever answer Ahriss expected, it’s not that. “You’re taking us to _Odessen_?” she starts, all pretense of calm in her posture replaced with alarm, under not a fair bit of anger. “You’re flying _this_ ship, which currently has _High Justice Vaylin_ onboard, to the hidden base of the forces trying to _destroy Zakuul_? Are you _utterly mad_?!”

“You’d prefer I dropped you off in the middle of a busy spaceport to try and hitch a ride with a freighter captain for hire, perhaps, _Outlander_?” Vestiin replies, with the hint of a sneer on the last word already anticipating how Ahriss bristled at the obnoxious moniker. Oh, yes, plenty of people would dismiss the Emperor’s Wrath as simply a brute with an uncommon talent for dealing bloody death – Ahriss knew better. And if she hadn’t, rubbing in her current status as a galactically-wanted fugitive instead of her _proper_ place as a _preeminent Lord and Councilor of the Sith Empire_ , would have fixed her misapprehension of that very quickly.

“And I’m sure this most fortunate captain would also possess a ship map with the hyperspace routes you would need to return there, as well, no?”

Oh yes, definitely rubbing it in. Ahriss’s anger seethes. “Which you _do_ possess, I assume? Would you care to enlighten me on that point?”

A fractional laugh, as if her question were preposterous. “My late master Baras is not the only Sith capable of maintaining an information network, you know. Nor your own Alliance puppetmaster – who I have noticed seems to be doing much better for her own purposes than she ever did for Sith Intelligence. Though of course she hasn’t yet succeeded in turning your base into a hermetically-sealed box, more’s the better for myself.”

Vestiin turns a hand up toward zer face, examining zer fingernails. Presuming it was something you could even _do_ through the Force, anyway, and not just a mannerism vhe’d adopted for the social effect…

Ahriss presses her lips together, eyes narrowing. “That doesn’t answer my question about Vaylin.”

She does not want to admit she is afraid. And she isn’t _truly_ , not now; it’s a distant fear, a small worm of wariness that might _become_ acute should the situation change… It’s not like immediate terror, or even slow-consuming dread. But that also means it’s not strong enough to draw power from, if she should need it, and that’s simply not a position she _likes_ to be in. Tepid emotions are a nuisance. She needs a definite answer.

“Vaylin is not a danger to any of us right now,” the Wrath replies after a moment of silence. Something in zer words, zer manner as vhe speaks, seems suddenly much more truthful, more final and certain, than any of their conversation before. “She is in my custody, and she will remain that way as long as I desire it. She will not threaten the Alliance, by her actions or her presence; you have my word of that.”

She’s not fond of simply taking people at their word. With a few exceptions, most imbued with spells and Force compulsions, they are easily spoken and discarded to suit the speaker’s whims. But the fact that they aren’t all dead in their sleep yet, at least, seems like a reasonable indication that Vestiin is telling the truth... Not that _Ahriss_ particularly understands on any intuitive level how zer power functions, but zer position and continued survival are at least proof of its existence, and that it’s presumably not exaggerated.

…and if Vestiin was mistaken, and a battle did erupt once they’d reached the planet’s surface, well… the Alliance had gathered many more Force-users to itself since Ahriss and Lana and the others had escaped Zakuul. Many were engaged in missions throughout the greater galaxy at any given time, but there was always still a sizeable contingent at their base as well. Vaylin, a presumably weakened Vaylin, would not be able to stand against them all.

And truly – even if Ahriss couldn’t go _home_ yet, not until Zakuul’s stranglehold on the Sith Empire was removed… the part of her that longed for home at least recognized that the Odessen base provided more of an approximation of it than this dragged-out botching of a trip did. She wanted her bed, her command; her friends, and _apprentices_ , and lovers.

There was really only one way forward from here.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone reading for being patient with my extremely erratic update process! This chapter was originally intended to be just a short bridging interlude, but partway through, things got a bit out of hand with those darned chatty Sith, and my ability to concentrate on writing took a bit of a nosedive.
> 
> (And if anyone was wondering.... While Meshurat does indeed have an information network, vhe was more or less lying through zer teeth by implication in zer explanation about how vhe got Odessen's coordinates and hyperspace route. Vhe actually just had it downloaded from Ahriss's own ship's computer after securing the Arcanum :P Sneaky sneaky Wrath.)


End file.
